Afghanistan Games: Robert Gates, Obama, and Karzai

“If I believe I am being gamed…,” President Barack Obama said, in a “blast” at an unhappy meeting about Afghanistan in March, 2011; that’s how Robert Gates, the former Secretary of Defense, remembers it, according to early reports on his memoir. (Bob Woodward and Greg Jaffe at the Washington Post and Thom Shanker at the Times got their hands on copies of the book, which comes out next week.) “I was pretty upset myself,” Gates continued:

As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand [Afghanistan President Hamid] Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

The ones Obama thought might do some gaming, in that particular anecdote, were his generals: David Petraeus, then the commander of American forces in Afghanistan (his assignment to the C.I.A., and resignation after an affair came to light, were still a year or two away), had made some remarks to reporters—was “popping off in the press,” as Gates remembers Obama putting it—less than fully enthusiastic about setting a timetable for a withdrawal of American troops, something the President wanted. Obama’s larger relationship with the military, and the Pentagon’s with his civilian advisers, is apparently one of the threads in Gates’s book, and a tangled one.

But Gates’s second thought that day—that Obama “can’t stand Karzai”—is at once more straightforward, and more frustrating. Obama would not have to wonder, then or now, whether Karzai might be gaming him. The only question is whether his moves are rational or irrational, motivated by politics or money or pride. One would worry a bit more if Gates reported that Obama romanticized Karzai, or thought he was pleasant to hang around with.

We are, after all, in the midst of a Karzai game right now. He has not yet signed a bilateral security agreement on the status of American forces in Afghanistan after 2014, even though he was told that not doing so by December 31st might mean that American and NATO troops just pull out pell-mell, even though a loya jirga, an Afghan council, told him to sign it, and senior Iraqi officials warned him that their failure to sign one had not worked out so well. Over the holidays, John McCain and Lindsey Graham flew to Afghanistan to try to get him to sign; on Monday, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said that, in terms of when it absolutely, positively needed to be signed, “I can tell you that we’re talking about weeks and not months. And the clock is ticking.”

Karzai would like to wait a little longer. He would like to think about it, and of other things to ask for in return, maybe until after his country’s next Presidential election, in April. By most accounts, he thinks he can—what is America going to do, leave? He does not believe that is our style. We could make it our style, and get out of there.

Greg Jaffe, in his review of Gates’s book, says that, on the subject of what Obama should have been doing in Afghanistan, it is “maddeningly self-contradictory”—words that can be applied to many aspects of our Afghan experience. Jaffe writes:

Gates’s problem with the president is less about strategy or substance than about heart. “I myself, our commanders, and our troops had expected more commitment to the cause and more passion for it from him,” Gates writes. He compares Obama unfavorably with Bush, who “had no second thoughts about Iraq, including our decision to invade.”

So Gates, who also writes that he himself could hardly bear the pain of losing our troops, just wanted Obama to be more excited about our war—to be game?

The arguments about staying in Afghanistan all have to do with not squandering what we have supposedly won there. That might better be protected by going, if it has anything to do with the rule of law. Why, after all, would Karzai want to wait until after the Presidential elections? He can’t run again, because of term limits—so why is he holding on to a bargaining chip in a game he should, by then, no longer be in? Let’s put aside the idea that he doesn’t think that as a lame duck, it’s his place; that’s definitely not Karzai’s style, something he’s indicated with his plans to move directly next door to the Presidential palace when his term is over—his new home, the Timesreported, citing Afghan officials, “will be an old, European-style mansion that, once renovations are done, will be roughly 13,000 square feet.” He has made it clear that he wants to hold on to certain other prerogatives, too. His family has secured a great deal of property during his tenure that it is unlikely to let go, and his associates have profitted from graft. (See Dexter Filkins on the Kabul Bank, for one example.) If we are expected to help facilitate corruption in return for a bilateral security agreement, the price really may be too high.

And then there is the election itself. There are close to a dozen candidates, a number of them Karzai’s allies, among them his brother, Abdul Qayum Karzai. The dread one has is that Karzai wants to make sure that he has leverage to insure we tolerate a fixed election. Is that the sort of player we want to be, and is that why Americans died in Afghanistan? Is that what we can stand?

Photograph by Jason Reed/Pool/AP.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.